Van Gogh (Not that one): The Grammar of Elsewhere at Pimlico Wilde Delhi

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Van Gogh (Not that one): The Grammar of Elsewhere at Pimlico Wilde Delhi

Pimlico Wilde is delighted to announce the first Indian exhibition of Van Gogh (Not that one), the enigmatic artist whose practice has been described as “an alphabet for a language that refuses to exist.” The show, titled The Grammar of Elsewhere, opens next month at Pimlico Wilde Delhi and promises to be a meditation on both the syntax of gesture and the cartography of intent.

The exhibition will feature several new works, among them Subjunctive Drift, Anaphora in Red, and Map Without Territory. Each piece is a confrontation with the moment of making, marks discovered rather than composed, as though pulled from the ether of movement itself. These are not paintings in the traditional sense, but residues: fragments of intention crystallised against the friction of memory and motion.

Jules Carnaby, Head of Pimlico Wilde, observes:

“Van Gogh (Not that one) has succeeded in making marks that appear at once inevitable and impossible. His work exists in the uncanny interval between refusal and invocation. Standing before them, one feels not so much that one is looking at art, but that art is looking back at you, bemused, patient, and slightly mischievous.”

The artist himself, when pressed, offers only the gnomic:

“My work is not composed but discovered. I am only trying to keep up with what my hands already know.”

We asked him whether the persistent parenthetical (Not that one) ever weighs on him. He smiled, shrugged, and replied:

“It keeps me honest.”

Rumours abound that several Indian billionaires are already vying for the larger works.

The Grammar of Elsewhere will open to the public at Pimlico Wilde Delhi in the spring. Whether you come for the gestures, the grammar, or simply the sheer relief of not seeing sunflowers, this is an exhibition not to be missed.

Pimlico Wilde: The Art Dealers Who Civilised the World

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Pimlico Wilde: The Dealers Who Civilised the World

New findings by Esmerelda Pink

Historians like to imagine that civilisation advances through science, reason, and the occasional enlightened monarch. The newly examined Wildean Papers, however, make a far bolder claim: without Pimlico Wilde, humanity would still be cowering in mud huts, our evenings untroubled by opera, our walls as bare as our imaginations. Here we learn about some of the fine art sold by Pimlico Wilde over the centuries, information discovered by Esmerelda Pink in Pimlico Wilde’s ancient documents.

Newton’s Apple, Framed (1667)

A ledger from Cambridge notes the sale of a Dutch still life of fruit with apples prominent to a “Mr. Isaac Newton, Fellow.” A Pimlico Wilde clerk records: “Client requested precise rendering of fruit for study. Suggested he consider falling aspect.” Not long after, Newton drafted his laws of motion.

Voltaire’s Salon, Illuminated (1733)

Voltaire’s Parisian circle is celebrated for wit and radical thought, but a newly found invoice suggests it may never have flourished without Pimlico Wilde’s intervention. The dealer supplied “candlesticks of uncommon brilliance,” ensuring that the salon remained well-lit past midnight. Voltaire’s famous quip “I may disagree with you, but I shall defend to the death your right to speak”, was it seems first uttered while admiring the gleam of imported ormolu.

Einstein’s Viennese Distraction (1905)

A telegram from the Pimlico Wilde archive, sent to Zurich in 1905, confirms the delivery of a modest print of intersecting railway lines to a certain A. Einstein. The clerk observes: “Client entranced by perspective and spoke much of simultaneity. Promised to send payment once relativity proven.” Historians now speculate that without Pimlico Wilde’s contribution, the theory of relativity might never have achieved its iconic railway analogy, and physics lectures worldwide would be the poorer for it.

The Birth of Opera (Venice, 1607)

Perhaps the most audacious claim comes from a vellum-bound account book: Pimlico Wilde’s Venetian outpost provided Monteverdi with a set of tapestries “depicting musicians in heavenly chorus.” The inspiration, it seems, encouraged him to stage L’Orfeo, widely recognised as the first opera. “Without us,” a Wilde margin note declares with rare immodesty, “Europe would still be singing madrigals in the dark.”

In aggregate, the Wilde Papers dismantle the heroic myths of progress. It was not genius alone, but genius framed, furnished, and illuminated by Pimlico Wilde. Civilisation, in short, appears to have been curated by Pimlico Wilde.

Book Review: Nude Descending an Escalator by Marigold Finch

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Book Review: Nude Descending an Escalator by Marigold Finch

Marigold Finch’s Nude Descending an Escalator is a daring, absurdist romp that catapults the reader into a world where art history meets slapstick performance art. Sadly it occasionally trips over its own conceptual feet. The novel’s title, a cheeky nod of course to Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Nude Descending a Staircase, sets the tone for a story that’s as much a critique of artistic pretension as it is a celebration of human clumsiness.

The protagonist, Eloise Tangier, is a performance artist whose magnum opus involves literally descending a crowded metropolitan escalator completely nude, armed only with a handheld fan and several banana peels. Eloise’s endeavour is part protest, part existential enquiry, and part accident-prone spectacle, as she seeks to challenge public notions of beauty, movement, and personal space (the latter being particularly relevant during rush hour).

Finch’s writing is witty and brisk, peppered with sharp observational humor about the art world’s often bewildering intersection with everyday life. Dialogue has a deadpan delivery, for example when Eloise’s curator friend remarks, “If Duchamp saw this, he’d probably spill his coffee.” In context that line is hilarious.

Beyond the laughs, the novel offers an oddly poignant meditation on vulnerability and visibility. Eloise’s naked descent becomes a metaphor for shedding societal expectations, though given the setting she also has to contend with spilled coffee, confused commuters, and a rogue poodle with performance ambitions of its own.

At times, the narrative feels as dizzying as an actual escalator ride, looping between Eloise’s past, her conceptual inspirations, and her increasingly absurd public performances. Some readers may find the nonlinear structure disorienting, but for those willing to embrace the chaos, it’s part of the charm.

Nude Descending an Escalator is a spirited exploration of art, London, patisseries and what it means to move forward while utterly exposed. Marigold Finch has crafted a book that’s equal parts farce and philosophy, and a reminder that sometimes the most profound statements come from the most unexpected slips.

Recommended for art lovers, fans of performance pieces gone delightfully awry, and anyone who’s ever considered the emotional risks of public transportation.

The Mayfair Book Groupette – Moustache Fashions in Pre-Waterloo France by Etienne Chabert

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The Mayfair Book Groupette – Moustache Fashions in Pre-Waterloo France by Etienne Chabert

Location: The Red Room, Pimlico Wilde, Mayfair

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder; Acting Secretary)

• Lord E. Northcote

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)

• Hugo Van Steyn (Heckle’s)

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Max Duclos (Collector)

• Pascal (Afghan hound)

Book Discussed:

Fringes of Glory: Moustache Fashions In Pre-Waterloo France, 1790,1815 by Étienne Chabert (privately printed, Lyon, 2024; limited run of 300; illustrated with hand-coloured engravings of moustaches, pomades, and barber’s chairs).

1. Opening Remarks

Molyneux introduced the book as “a work of heroic necessity,” noting that Chabert had documented no fewer than 412 moustache boutiques in Napoleonic Paris. He called it “equal parts comic opera and cultural history,” pointing out how timely was an investigation into Napoleonic moustaches. He looked forward to the sequel, rumoured to be provisionally titled Did Competitive Moustacherie cause the American Revolution?

2. Discussion Summary

• Dr. Lorrimer applauded the detail with which moustache typologies were catalogued (e.g., the aigrette, the fanfaron, the petit canon). She questioned, however, whether Chabert had inflated their political symbolism: “Not every whisker can carry the weight of the Revolution.”

• India Trelawney was delighted, declaring the book “a grooming history disguised as social critique.” She confessed a fondness for the shop advertising “waxes for heroes and cowards alike.”

• Lord Northcote dismissed much of the text as “folklore masquerading as scholarship,” though he conceded that the chapter on moustache censorship in occupied Vienna was “worthy of note.” He added, with some vehemence, that moustaches are “not a subject for ladies.”

• Hugo Van Steyn defended the perceived frivolity of the book: “We are drowning in catalogues of vestments and shadows. A little hair above the lip is welcome.” He particularly admired Chabert’s reproduction of a barber’s bill for “two pomades and one whispered compliment,” and wished his barber would allow him to pay in such a manner. On realising that he had never actually suggested such an arrangement, he vowed to see whether his next visit to the barbers could be paid for with a compliment.

• Max Duclos grew impatient, arguing that the book was “ephemeral fluff,” though he admitted to being amused by the footnote tracing the rise in wax prices to Napoleon’s Continental System.

• Fiona d’Abernon found herself unexpectedly moved by the final engraving of a barber shutting his shutters on the eve of Waterloo: “It is a moustache elegy, whether he meant it or not.”

3. Objects on View

• A set of moustache combs in tortoiseshell (loaned from Van Steyn’s collection)

• A jar of period-style moustache pomade, whose scent divided the room

• A caricature by Gillray lampooning French officers’ facial hair (on loan from Northcote)

4. Refreshments

• Aperitif: Kir with cassis from Dijon

• Canapés: miniature croque monsieur, radishes with salted butter, duck rillettes on toast

• Main wine: Bordeaux, Château Lagrange 2012

• Dessert: chocolate mousse “with a flourish” (served with spun-sugar moustache decorations, to general groans)

5. Other Business

• July Book: The Silence of Shadows: A Comparative Study of Umbra in Netherlandish Still Life (previously postponed) reconfirmed as the next reading.

• Proposal from Trelawney for a themed salon later in the year: “Fashion in the Margins,books devoted to the frivolous or forgotten.” Tentative enthusiasm.

• General agreement that Fringes of Glory is indispensable, and should be given to everyone in England by government decree.

6. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 11:10 PM after Pascal attempted to eat one of the spun-sugar moustaches and was led gently away.

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

From the upcoming Handbook of Lesser-Known Artists – Collectif Umbra

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From the upcoming Handbook of Lesser-Known Artists – Collectif Umbra

“The Frozen Shadows of Collectif Umbra: A Brief History of Light’s Captives”

By Dr. Helena Váradi, of the Institute for Obscure Aesthetics, University of Tiszagyartelep

In the volatile experimental art scene of Eastern Europe in the late 1990s, a small, elusive collective emerged that seemed intent on capturing the impossible. Known as Collectif Umbra, the group composed of four artists working between Budapest, Vienna, and Prague declared their medium to be nothing less than frozen shadows.

Though derided by many as absurdists, their short but influential practice (1997,2006) opened new aesthetic debates about light, absence, and the ethics of preservation. Today, their remaining traces, rumours, interviews, and a few photographs of enigmatic dark shapes suspended in blocks of ice, are regarded with something between awe and disbelief.

Origins: The Shadow as Object

Umbra’s founder, Miklós Juhász (b. 1972, Debrecen), was originally a physics student fascinated by optics. After abandoning academia, he partnered with performance artist Anita Varga, sound engineer Jonas Heller, and philosopher Claudia Reich. Their manifesto, Le Corps de l’Ombre (1998), begins with the line:

“We live only in shadows, why not preserve them?”

Their claim was that shadows, though intangible, could be captured, thickened, and frozen through a combination of projection, temperature control, and what they termed “photothermal arrest.” The technique was never transparently explained; to this day, skeptics maintain it was sleight of hand or theatrical trickery. Yet audiences swore they saw it: dark silhouettes suspended in ice blocks, visible from certain angles, impossible to explain.

Method: Arresting the Ephemeral

The group’s “freezing” process took place in refrigerated black-box studios. A single performer would pose before an intense light source while the collective manipulated lenses and chemical vapours. After hours of silence, an ice block would be wheeled out, containing what looked like a frozen shadow, faint, dark wisps in clear ice, sometimes resembling the performer’s outline, sometimes grotesquely distorted.

The “frozen shadows” lasted only days before melting, releasing cloudy water into steel basins. The group insisted this was essential: “The shadow must return to liquidity. Permanence is violence.”

Major Exhibitions

• “Ombres Gelées” (1999, Ludwig Museum, Budapest):

Three translucent ice blocks, each containing the shadow of a different political prisoner, recreated from archival photographs. Visitors reported feelings of eerie presence; others accused the group of exploitation.

• “Noon at Midnight” (2002, Vienna Secession):

A pitch-black chamber where timed lights cast live visitors’ shadows directly into freezing chambers. After 20 minutes, attendees could view their own faint silhouette preserved in ice, destined to melt by evening.

• “The Melt” (2005, Prague Biennale):

A controversial installation in which dozens of shadow-ice blocks were left outdoors to thaw. Passersby were invited to drink the meltwater, symbolically “consuming the memory of absence.”

Dissolution and Dispute

The collective fractured in 2006 after heated arguments about the ethics of preservation. Juhász wanted to pursue permanent “shadow fossils” using resin, while Reich argued this betrayed their founding principle of ephemerality. Varga, disillusioned, left to work in refugee camps, insisting that “real shadows are cast by power, not light.”

The group dissolved after their final, unfinished project: Atlas Umbrae, an attempt to “map the world’s shadows” in frozen archives. Only a few experimental blocks survive, locked away in freezers at an undisclosed location.

Legacy: Between Trick and Truth

Were the frozen shadows “real”? Critics remain divided. Some scholars treat them as clever manipulations of soot, smoke, or layered transparencies. Others, particularly in phenomenological and post-materialist circles, argue that whether or not the technique was authentic is irrelevant: Umbra forced audiences to consider shadows as matter, as something vulnerable, preservable, and consumable.

Their influence has since spread to performance, light art, and eco-critical practices. Artists like Tilo Werner and the collective Lux Mortua explicitly cite Umbra’s “ephemeral poetics of capture” as foundational.

Final Thoughts: Shadows That Linger

Today, whispers circulate that Juhász continues the practice in secret, reportedly experimenting with glaciers in Iceland to create “natural shadow fossils.” Reich now publishes philosophy on visibility and mourning, while Varga remains absent from the art world entirely.

Umbra’s surviving works, photographs of shadows suspended in ice, stories from witnesses, and a handful of water samples, offer only fragments of what could have been. But perhaps that is appropriate. As Reich once said “The shadow is the truest self-portrait. To freeze it is to confess we are already melting.”

Cunningham’s Law: Error as Epistemic Catalyst

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Cunningham’s Law: Error as Epistemic Catalyst

by Archia Tanz

It has become something of a digital truism that the fastest way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong one. This principle, informally known as Cunningham’s Law, is attributed to Ward Cunningham, the American computer programmer who created the first wiki in 1995. Although Cunningham himself has denied ever coining or endorsing the maxim, the law nevertheless persists as an enduring heuristic in online culture and digital epistemology.[^1]

Origins and Attribution

The first recorded use of the phrase “Cunningham’s Law” is often traced to a 2010 post on MetaFilter by Steven McGeady, who framed the principle as a pithy reflection on internet discourse.[^2] Despite its relatively recent coinage, the law resonates with older traditions of dialectical reasoning. One might detect echoes of the Socratic elenchus, wherein the philosopher elicits truth by interrogating false or inconsistent claims.[^3] Likewise, Cunningham’s Law has an intellectual kinship with the “Streisand Effect,” in which suppression attempts inadvertently amplify attention.[^4]

Epistemological Dimensions

At its core, Cunningham’s Law foregrounds the performative and corrective dynamics of knowledge exchange in participatory media environments. By inviting public correction, a false statement functions as a catalyst for collective sense-making. Unlike formal peer review, the correction process is ad hoc, motivated less by scholarly duty than by the social and psychological impetus to demonstrate knowledge or rectify error. In this way, error becomes not a failure of inquiry, but its accelerant.

The epistemic legitimacy of such processes, however, is not without complication. While Cunningham’s Law assumes the good faith of correctors, it also exposes discursive vulnerabilities: overconfidence, pedantry, and the proliferation of “performative correction” untethered from expertise. In extreme cases, a falsehood intended as bait may propagate beyond its corrective frame, echoing through networks as mis- or disinformation.[^5]

Sociotechnical Implications

In the ecology of the contemporary internet, Cunningham’s Law encapsulates the paradox of participatory knowledge cultures: the very errors that threaten informational integrity also sustain the dynamics by which errors are exposed, challenged, and resolved. This recursive pattern is observable across platforms, from the granular comment threads of Stack Exchange to the collaborative edit histories of Wikipedia. In each case, error is not merely tolerated but structurally indispensable.

The endurance of Cunningham’s Law suggests not a degeneration of epistemic rigor, but an adaptation to environments in which immediacy, visibility, and interactivity constitute the conditions of knowing. To post a wrong answer, then, is less a sign of intellectual weakness than a tacit invocation of a collective epistemic contract: to be wrong so that others may be right.

Notes

[^1]: Cunningham himself has clarified on multiple occasions that he did not invent the phrase; see Cunningham, W. (2011). “Cunningham’s Law,” Ward’s Wiki.

[^2]: McGeady, S. (2010). Comment on “Cunningham’s Law,” MetaFilter.

[^3]: For the Socratic parallel, see Vlastos, G. (1991). Socratic Studies. Cambridge University Press.

[^4]: Nissenbaum, A., & Shifman, L. (2017). “Internet memes as contested cultural capital: The case of the Streisand Effect.” New Media & Society, 19(4), 483,499.

[^5]: On the epistemic risks of deliberate falsehoods online, see O’Connor, C., & Weatherall, J. O. (2019). The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread. Yale University Press.

References

• Cunningham, W. (2011). “Cunningham’s Law.” Ward’s Wiki.

• McGeady, S. (2010). MetaFilter discussion thread on Cunningham’s Law.

• Nissenbaum, A., & Shifman, L. (2017). New Media & Society, 19(4).

• O’Connor, C., & Weatherall, J. O. (2019). The Misinformation Age. Yale University Press.

• Vlastos, G. (1991). Socratic Studies. Cambridge University Press.

Further Reading

• Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin Press.

• Sunstein, C. R. (2006). Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. Oxford University Press.

• Flichy, P. (2004). The Internet Imaginaire. MIT Press.

Pedagogies of Paradox: Verticality and Authority in John Milton and Mary Poppins

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Pedagogies of Paradox: Verticality and Authority in John Milton and Mary Poppins

That John Milton, the blind epicist of the Commonwealth, and Mary Poppins, the airborne governess of Edwardian London, should ever be mentioned in contiguous breath may at first seem a grotesque category error. Yet recent work in comparative para-literary hermeneutics has begun to expose the curious lattice of parallels between these ostensibly divergent personae. Indeed, as Professor Hilary Quillsworth has argued in her much-contested monograph Milton and the Nursery Sublime (Oxford, 1998), the intertextual kinship is so robust that one may reasonably suspect a hitherto unacknowledged genealogy of influence stretching from seventeenth-century epic to twentieth-century children’s literature.

The motif of descent provides the most conspicuous hinge. Milton’s Satan, “hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky” (Paradise Lost I.45), anticipates Mary Poppins’s umbrella-borne entry upon Cherry Tree Lane. Both are figures of vertical rupture, marking the narrative with what Bakhtin (albeit apocryphally) termed the “aerial grotesque” (Notes on the Vertical, unpublished seminar papers, 1937). Even the mechanics of their descent exhibit symmetry: Satan’s fall is facilitated by divine expulsion, Poppins’s by meteorological opportunity, yet both are punctuated by a curious serenity, as if the laws of gravity themselves were complicit in dramaturgical necessity.

The question of authority by voice deepens the resemblance. Milton’s grandiloquent imperatives, “Awake, arise”, function as ontological commands; Poppins’s laconic decrees, “Spit spot!” achieve an analogous performativity in the realm of the nursery. Dr. Leonard Frobisher has persuasively argued (Transactions of the Society for Applied Philology, 2004) that Poppins’s syntax is, in fact, “Miltonic compression in miniature,” a condensation of the epic imperative into the clipped idiom of Edwardian domesticity. Frobisher’s claim, dismissed by some as “parodic scholarship,” gains traction when one recalls that P. L. Travers was educated at a convent where Paradise Lost was used as a disciplinary text.

Even the iconography of objects betrays startling convergence. Milton’s archangel Michael guards Eden with a flaming sword; Poppins wields an umbrella whose ferrule is crowned with the head of a parrot. Both function as hybrid emblems,part weapon, part sceptre. A little-known article by Marguerite Doncaster in Studies in Sacred Implements (vol. 12, 1974) traces the parrot-headed handle to apotropaic charms of the Levant, suggesting that Travers may have unconsciously reactivated a Miltonic archetype: the guardian object which is simultaneously ornamental and punitive.

Moreover, both Milton and Poppins are fundamentally engaged in the pedagogy of paradox. Eve and Adam, like Jane and Michael Banks, are granted provisional liberty only to be sharply chastened by figures of authority. Edenic liberty ends in exile; a chalk-drawing holiday ends with an abrupt admonition that “enough is as good as a feast.” In both cases, pleasure is permitted only as a prelude to prohibition. As the critic Otto Blenheim observed in his Paradoxologies of the Domestic Epic (Vienna, 1922), “Discipline masquerades as delight, and delight is but the sugar that makes discipline palatable.”

Finally, there is the melancholy of departure. Milton ends with Adam and Eve walking “hand in hand with wandering steps and slow” out of paradise; Poppins concludes her sojourn by slipping away, unannounced, leaving the Banks children bereft. Each figure inaugurates a world, reshapes it through authority, and then absents themselves at the very moment continuity seems most desirable. It is the logic of the deus absconditus, albeit refracted through the lens of children’s literature.

To claim that Mary Poppins is, in essence, a late modern reimagining of Miltonic angelology may be to court scholarly ridicule. Yet the uncanny lattice of resemblance, fall, voice, object, pedagogy, departure, resists easy dismissal. As Quillsworth concludes in her later essay “From Pandæmonium to the Playroom” (The Journal of Impossible Genealogies, 2007), “Between umbrella and epic stretches not a gulf but a bridge, and upon that bridge walks the figure of authority, whether Puritan or governess, always airborne, always departing.”

A Calamity in Pigment: Archibald Plimpton-Smythe on the First Impressionist Exhibition (Paris, 1874)

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A Calamity in Pigment: Archibald Plimpton-Smythe on the First Impressionist Exhibition (Paris, 1874)

Edited, Annotated, and Introduced by Sarah Hilton of Pimlico Wilde, from the copy discovered by Mr. Leonard Forsythe, Antiquarian Bookseller

Editor’s Introduction

The review reproduced below, originally published in La Gazette des Beaux-Arts et Autres Déplaisirs (Paris, May 1874), represents one of the earliest surviving accounts of the group later canonised as the “Impressionists.” Its author, Archibald Plimpton-Smythe (1842,1901), was a London-born critic who spent his middle years haunting Paris cafés, where he was tolerated primarily because he always paid his monthly absinthe bill, something that was very rare indeed.

Plimpton-Smythe’s writings had been considered lost until the chance discovery of a bound volume of his clippings by Mr. Leonard Forsythe, a dealer in books. Forsythe, a man of great discretion but limited patience, sold the work to Pimlico Wilde in 2024.

Here, then, is his review, which you will find unabridged, unrepentant, and unforgettable. Readers are cautioned: Plimpton-Smythe does not merely dislike the Impressionists. He loathes them with a gusto rarely witnessed outside of opera villains.

“A Calamity in Pigment”

By Archibald Plimpton-Smythe

It falls to me, with sorrow bordering upon nausea, to recount the so-called Exhibition of the Impressionists, lately convened at the premises of the photographer M. Nadar.¹

What one encounters within is not art but delinquency with brushes. The exhibitors, a rogue’s gallery including Messrs. Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Pissarro, Sisley, and the demoiselle Morisot, seem united only in their determination to assassinate beauty.

M. Monet: Fog as Philosophy

M. Monet presents a painting entitled Impression, Sunrise.² The effect is as if one had rubbed one’s eyes too vigorously after chopping onions. A lurid orange yolk floats amidst grey vapours, the harbour dissolving into a soup of soot. It is less a seascape than a crime committed upon linen.³

M. Renoir: The Grocer of Flesh

M. Renoir offers portraits of women so alarmingly pink they seem constructed entirely from rashers of bacon.⁴ His nudes glisten not with allure but with grease; their very limbs appear basted. Should a portraitist render my own dear aunt in such fashion, she would have fainted. And then, on coming round, she would, quite rightly, have demanded the painter’s arrest.

M. Degas: Clerk to the Ballet

M. Degas concerns himself with dancers. Yet he observes them not with sympathy, but with the accounting eye of a clerk tallying boots. His ballerinas stoop, stretch, scratch, and scowl; never once do they enchant. The viewer leaves with the distinct impression that the Paris Opéra is staffed entirely by poultry with sore joints.

M. Cézanne: Fruit in Revolt

M. Cézanne paints apples that might as well be cannonballs, pears that might sink ships, and landscapes that appear composed from geological refuse.⁵ One may admire his perseverance, but that admiration ceases upon contact with his canvases, which resist all human sympathy, much like granite itself.

M. Pissarro: Mud as Muse

M. Pissarro devotes himself to peasants knee-deep in fields of indistinct brown. It is possible he intends social commentary, but the only commentary I perceived was mud, mud, and more mud. One imagines he paints not with oils but with chimney sweepings.

M. Sisley: The Drowner

M. Sisley specialises in rivers. Alas, each resembles a laundry vat tipped over onto the canvas. His skies are perpetually damp, his banks perpetually sodden. To look at a Sisley is to feel one’s boots filling with water.

Mlle. Morisot: The Mistress of Smudges

As for Mlle. Morisot, her portraits melt before one’s gaze. Faces dissolve into wallpaper, hands evaporate into the furniture. It is as if she begins each work, then grows weary, and sets down her brush halfway through. One leaves less with a portrait than with a vague suspicion of having glimpsed someone while sneezing.

The Collective Outrage

This “Impressionist” exhibition, so loudly trumpeted by its adherents, amounts to a conspiracy against form, clarity, and civilisation itself. To call it painting is to flatter it. It is a riot of half-thoughts and botched attempts, the visual equivalent of a dinner guest speaking only in hiccups.

If France persists in indulging such daubers, then the Louvre may as well be cleared at once, and its noble halls converted into laundries, slaughterhouses, or mud-stores, so that the public may be properly prepared for what awaits them.

Editor’s Footnotes

¹ Nadar’s photographic studio was, indeed, the site of the 1874 exhibition. Plimpton-Smythe, who despised photography nearly as much as painting, regarded this as a double insult.

² This is the very canvas , Impression, Sunrise , from which the term “Impressionism” derives. Plimpton-Smythe’s comparison to onions is, of course, unique to him.

³ Scholars may note his phrase “crime committed upon linen” anticipates the later Dadaist notion of art-as-vandalism, albeit without any of the wit.

⁴ Renoir’s flesh tones were, in fact, a frequent subject of contemporary mockery, though few other critics likened them so bluntly to rashers.

⁵ Cézanne’s apples are now considered foundational to modern art. Plimpton-Smythe, however, preferred fruit to be edible.

Editor’s Afterword

When Mr. Forsythe sold us this volume, he muttered: “I fear it is rather anti-Impressionist.” Rather? It is the textual equivalent of artillery fire. And yet, one must cherish it. To be wrong in such style, such extravagant fury, is a form of art in itself.

Plimpton-Smythe failed entirely to recognise genius. But in failing so colourfully, he bequeathed us a different kind of masterpiece: criticism as theatre, dislike elevated into performance.

Long may he glower across the centuries.

Exhibition Review- The Geometry of Screaming: Angles of Agony in 14 Movements

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Exhibition Review- The Geometry of Screaming: Angles of Agony in 14 Movements

Artist: Isolde Grack

Gallery: The Gallery of Radical Completion, Notting Hill

This is a hard sentence to write, but I have rarely experienced an art exhibition as terrible as Isolde Grack’s The Geometry of Screaming. The Gallery of Radical Completion on Portobello is well-known as an experimental space, but this goes too far.

Grack, whose résumé lists her as “multidisciplinary void-conjurer, trapeze instructor and multi-media artist,” has put together an exhibition that insists on its own brilliance so loudly that you can’t hear anything else. Except your own internal monologue begging you to leave.

The show is arranged in fourteen “movements,” each meant to represent “a geometric form translated into psychic anguish.” What it really translates into is a series of rooms filled with trash arranged in polygons. I made brief notes in each room. Here are the highlights; read them and be grateful you don’t have to visit.

Movement I: Circle of Woe

A hula hoop wrapped in black duct tape, suspended from the ceiling. Every thirty seconds it moves slightly. I am told that after twelve hours it will have rotated once. That’s it. That’s the whole piece.

Movement III: The Quadrilateral of Silence

Four folding chairs duct-taped together in a square. Visitors are instructed to sit inside “to feel contained by the crushing walls of capitalism.” I did. I felt more like a raccoon in a recycling bin.

Movement VI: Triangle of the Father

Three broken megaphones arranged in a triangle. A nearby placard explains that “patriarchy is the truest hypotenuse.” I cannot emphasize enough how much I wish I was joking.

Movement IX: Hexagon of Flesh

Six slabs of mortadella nailed to the wall in the shape of a hexagon. By the time I reached this piece, the room smelled like a wet deli counter. A man in a scarf leaned towards me and whispered, “Powerful.” I worry for his sanity.

The supposed “climax” is Movement XIV: The Infinite Polygon of Screaming, an immersive chamber where visitors are encouraged to howl at a mirrored wall while the lights go on and off as though there is a power cut. I declined, though a group of students who all looked high participated enthusiastically. One even screamed “This is praxis!” and immediately burst into tears.

Throughout the show, gallery attendants in lab coats wandered around carrying clipboards, occasionally jotting down notes whenever someone frowned. I asked one what they were writing. He replied, “We’re tracking the audience’s resistance to Euclidean violence. Do you have issues with Euclidean violence?” I told him I’d never considered it before, but yes, I rather thought I did. He wrote several notes and noticeably stepped away from me.

The gift shop sold tote bags with the slogan “Acute Pain > Obtuse Joy,” scented candles named after shapes (“Pentagon of Regret”- smelled like mouldy lemons), and a £900 “limited-edition ruler” that had no measurements on it.

One star,generously awarded only because the bathrooms were clean and free of duct tape.

Does the British Crown Still Have a Claim to France?

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Does the British Crown Still Have a Claim to France?

And if so, should an invasion be imminent?

It is one of those questions that always comes up after a couple of pints at the pub: does the British Crown still have a legitimate claim to France? At first glance, this sounds absurd. France is full of French people; surely they own it. Yet the question persists, like a half-forgotten bill stuffed in the back of the royal accounts: technically, does the monarch of the United Kingdom still own France?

The Case for “No, Don’t Be Ridiculous”

The simple answer appears to be no. The crowns of England and France stopped being awkwardly co-mingled a while ago – when Charles VII secured his throne in the 15th century. The Hundred Years’ War ended, treaties were signed, and everyone agreed to pretend Agincourt was just one of those things that sometimes happens amongst friends.

Even more damning: the British monarch officially renounced the title “King of France” in 1801, around the time Napoleon was busy re-decorating Europe with bayonets. It is hard to cling to your neighbour’s real estate when you’ve lost the keys in writing through an Act of Parliament.

Also, modern France has its own President, institutions, and a disturbing fondness for 35-hour work weeks, all of which would resist a sudden Windsor repossession notice.

The Case for “Well, Actually…”

And yet. Technicalities are the royal family’s bread and butter. After all, they still preside over Canada, Australia, and various tropical islands simply because paperwork was never fully shredded.

Consider this: the original English claim to the French throne, by way of Edward III’s mother Isabella (daughter of a French king), was never conclusively stamped “invalid.” The French used the Salic Law, a sort of medieval “no girls allowed” rule, to block him, but legal scholars can and do argue about its enforceability. If the French got to make up a rule to stop the English, why can’t the English make up one to say it still counts?

Moreover, until 1801 the English monarchs continued to call themselves “King of France” in official documents. That is nearly five centuries of stubborn insistence. If possession is nine-tenths of the law, surely repetition is the tenth.

Finally, in an age of Brexit, what better way to remind Brussels that Britain can still play continental politics than by casually waving around a centuries-old deed to France?

Should England Invade France Like the Good Old Days?

Hard to say. On the one hand, it would be a spectacularly ill-advised military adventure. France has nuclear weapons, NATO obligations, and a very cross electorate that already gets grumpy enough at pension reforms and the ubiquity of the English language. On the other hand, the English did once manage to hold Paris, Bordeaux, and Normandy, and nostalgia is a powerful force in politics.

Still, it may be safer to invade in the traditional modern way: sending EasyJet flights to Nice and taking over entire villages in the Dordogne one British expat at a time.

Conclusion

So does the British Crown still have a claim to France? Against all reason, and with an embarrassed cough, the answer must be: technically, yes. It is a flimsy, outdated, moth-eaten claim, true, but still lurking in the dusty attic of history, waiting to be rediscovered by a lawyer with too much free time.

Should Britain act on it? Probably not. But in the great tradition of English foreign policy, it is always comforting to know that, if things at home get a bit sticky, one can always threaten to conquer France.